I don’t have answers for the specific issues he brought up but as always it helps to be critical and look for the deeper issue. For example, I’ve heard a second hand account (as in, someone told me what a Cuban told them) that it’s a poor country with the example that meat is not easy to get there. One has to ask, is that a failure of the Cuban government or an effect of the embargo?

For the May Day parade thing we need more information. How are you going to get screwed over if you don’t go? Maybe it’s just a societal expectation and people will frown/comment if you don’t go, but I doubt you’re getting fired over it or a parade you missed some years ago will bite you in the ass.

For the “mansions for the higher-ups, squalor for the populace” argument, it helps to ask about the scale of it. Socialism Betrayed mentions that in the USSR the higher ups lived in special, more luxurious apartments and had access to a super market with rarer imports (it mentions bananas or some other fruit, probably because no country traded them because of the US). This is a better standard of living that the average citizen, but it’s much closer to them than what we see in western countries.

Hopefully someone has more specifics, but you get the point.

a mod that gave nearly every item weight including money and caps.

JSawyer mod ?

Soviet Union General Secretary Joseph Stalin broke the Non-Intervention Agreement and League of Nations embargo by providing material assistance to the Republican forces, becoming their only source of major weapons.

From August 1936 onward, over one ship per day arrived at Spain’s Mediterranean ports with Russian aid: munitions, rifles, machine guns, hand grenades, artillery, trucks, Soviet agents, technicians, instructors, and propagandists.

may never be secure

Is there hope? […] Probably not.

I have to read the cited paper because this seems like bullshit. Similarly to “Garbage In, Garbage Out” (referring to the quality of the training data), how about “Secrets In, Secrets Out”?

Don’t include passwords.txt in the training data, how hard can that be?

No y-axis label = garbage graph

Do that many people use hidden ssids that it’s worth for non-state actors to track them?

Can you elaborate? I know that it is Chinese instagram, but why is it a world historic event?

I’m sure the fact that the article came out the day they conducted a missile test is a pure coincidence

Maybe it’s too early and I haven’t completely woken up yet, but I don’t understand what the article is trying to say. “China has a plan”, " China will attempt to retaliate", “China is seeking other trade partners now that the US is using tariffs against them”… Umm yeah? No shit? So many words for stating the obvious.

dust: better version of du. There’s also diskonaut which is an interactive tool.

If you’re interested in card games check the events of your local game shops (LGS). They’ll probably have weekly meets for at least one TCG.

I play some MtG and highly recommend it. The community has shifted in the last years and is mostly supportive of proxies, meaning printing your own cards instead of buying them. Most people are ok with them in Commander, the 4-player free for all casual format which has become the most popular one.

Competitive 1v1 formats can get expensive quickly, and I haven’t bothered with them. There’s however Pauper, playing only with cards of common rarity. Meta decks cost 50$ there. From what I’ve heard from my LGS, its community is also welcoming, with players bringing in extra decks to loan to newbies.

The holidays got me feeling lonely again. I try not to dwell on it too much and keep doing things I enjoy, but they feel empty without someone to share them with.

To be fair I think Balkan cities are safer when considering crimes like homicides and muggings

Legally too, if I’m not mistaken

What does Luigi’s mansion have to do with this?

Reminder:

As I explained in my book, Elon Musk admitted to his biographer that he only announced Hyperloop because he wanted California’s high-speed rail system to get canceled.

adding that any attempts by Macron to use violence to stifle the peaceful protests will be met with condemnation and heavy sanctions.

This would be so funny

I wouldn’t use it, I totally agree with you. I don’t understand why the original commentor said that using it in 1948 was racist, though

So you’re saying it was not racist to use back then, but people using it now are doing it in a pejorative manner? It makes sense.

As for the original article, a quick google search says that moslem was the most commonly used denomination in the start of the 20th century, so I think there’s a good chance it was not used pejoratively.